NetBSD 10 Beta Brings Much Improved Performance, Long Overdue Hardware Support

After being in development for three years the first beta builds of the upcoming NetBSD 10.0 operating system release are now available for testing.

NetBSD 10.0 Beta is available today as an early Christmas gift to BSD operating system fans. Given the amount of time in development and all that's happened since 2019, there is a ton in store for NetBSD 10.0. Among the changes to find with the NetBSD 10 beta release is:

- "A major milestone on performance" and in particular NetBSD 10's multi-core system performance should be much faster than prior releases.

- WireGuard compatibility.

- Automatic SWAP encryption.

- New disk encryption methods and CPU acceleration within the kernel for crypto operations.

- Open-source GPU kernel drivers ported over from the Linux 5.6 kernel... Yes, dated compared to Linux 6.2 upstream but at least better than before.

- Support for more Arm hardware such as the Apple M1 / Rockchip RK356x SoCs / Amlogic g12 / Raspberry Pi 4.

- Support for new network adapters like Realtek 2.5 Gigabit Ethernet and newer Intel 10/25/40 Gigabit Ethernet adapters.

- NetBSD's DTrace code has been ported to MIPS.

- A rework to the Xen hypervisor support.

- blkdiscard has been added to user-space for manually TRIM'ing a disk.

- DisplayPort and HDMI audio is now enabled in the default x86 kernel builds.

More details on all of the NetBSD 10.0 Beta changes and downloads of the operating system images can be found via NetBSD.org.